lemonade
by electric caterpillar
Summary: Bugsy/Tsukushi departing, hard M for disturbing content
1. it was cinco de mayo

we climbed the rocks and snow and rain

in search of magic powers

to heal our mother's pain

* * *

His many sisters saw him every day. They slept together in one room he was told was rented out of the radio tower he could see blinking its suspicious red eye in the night far away outside the window of the small, smelly room cluttered with his affects he was confined to. He imagined vividly their lengths of hair, the precise fine moony color of his own, curled and coiled together as they sweetly dreamed in their roost above the still city.

He would have expected to be _tortured_ by them for supplying the purpose for their discomfort.

Instead, they were never kinder. Of their own volition they brushed his hair for him, cut his nails, cleaned his face with tissues they kissed. They read to him for hours, books he hadn't seen since he was a baby but secretly still loved, _The Hungry Caterpie_, _Scyther and Scizor_, _Clefairy's Day_, plus every encyclopedia of insects available in every shop in Goldenrod. They drew his picture. They pieced together huggable creatures of quilt fabrics to surprise him with. They pooled their pocket money to buy him bags of cheerfully colored candy, which he promptly vomited.

They left every night before they began to cry, but Bugsy heard echoing down the high sterile hall with their footsteps the volume of their tears rise in pitch and intensity until they were not quite screaming an instant before they were shut out of earshot.

His mother did not leave his side except for a spare few hours every week where she had to be tranquilized and carried away - his lovely little mother, who gave him his small but articulate hands, his dense downy curls, the genteel tenor of his voice, his slightness, his earnest sweetness, eleven years of her life, the desperate raw entirety of her heart.

She did not cry any more. She merely sat, wilted with infinite weariness, stroking his hand in both of hers and looked and looked and looked at him as if she had never seen such a thing, as if trying against reason, against nature to see him growing - or going.

Come evening she would squeeze beneath him into the child-sized cot, displacing his various teddies and the curling strings of bouquets of balloons to hold him and lull him with some meaningless lovely dream melody, and somehow, despite the needles stitched in his soft inner arm and the pestilential fog that retarded his breath and bowels and the painful crusts of fatigue in his elbows and knees and souring his eyesight Bugsy with his cheek on his mother's soft warm pink breast and his hand on the belly where he began could not recall ever feeling quite so happy.

He would slip then from his sickness into a secret sea contained in him where it was twinkling green summer full of bright birdsong and cicada's accompaniment and the brilliance and fragrance of flowers rioting in the trees, in the pregnant fields, by the biting cold clear creek with rainbow stones tumbled in the depths beyond the silver bubble veils of little fish, where he ran fat and brown and nude as a cherub, his breath free and fresh, his legs strong, his trunk and head upright without effort, without pain, and his special friend bleating sweetly flew forward of him into an astonishingly blue sky.

And sometimes, before his mother caught him and clutched him close in the clinical colorless dark and cried her meager condolences to him, he dreamed the world fell dissonant, like a record played on a machine running down, a little too sharp, a little too intense, and hard large male hands pulled his hair hard and smothered his mouth and opened his clothes to slip like eels down his stomach.

"It's okay," she would swear, rocking him in her heat in the deep hard dark, "it's okay, my baby, it'll be okay. It'll be okay. It'll be okay."

But Bugsy knew as precisely and entirely as he knew his mother's face even when he could not see her that he would never be okay again.


	2. no more breathing-time

"I miss Scyfie," he told his mother, who appeared not to understand him. She looked through his eyes as one might look through a window at familiar scene.

"I miss Scyfie," he told his second-eldest and middle sisters, who had been performing an impromptu puppet show with a fat yellow bear and a mylar ledyba. One smiled vacuously below hollow eyes and one frowned a deep, brittle, heart-breaking frown down at him.

"Can he come and see me?" She wouldn't respond.

"Can he come and see me?" She wouldn't respond.

"Can he come and see me?" Every nurse and his doctor (who appeared now only now and again bearing some trinket to appear sympathetic to him now that everything that could be done had been done) would not say, demanding of him to how he felt, how was his room, did he like his new toys? And could they do anything more for him? Good afternoon, then.

"I miss Scyfie," he said aloud in the room abandoned by all but the facsimile of his mother and the palette of baby cheer born by the stuffed animals and flowers and books collecting in the squalor which began already to repel him by their insincerity and wastefulness, and uttered a cracking painful sob that would have begun crying had he the strength available to him.

His mother stroked the brittle ends of what his hair was becoming and sighed such a sigh as could not have been uttered by a thirty-five-year-old woman, not by a human woman. A daisy-shaped balloon which beseeched him in jolly peach pink cursive to "get well soon!" pirouetted twice on the ceiling and burst with a deafening crack.

Bugsy hiccuped. With tremendous effort, he moaned.

His mother lifted him as easily as she would shift his reflection in water and he drowsed, a dreary promenade through a dark lit inner room with the soreness of his sorrow pulsing behind his eyes, until the urgent murmur of the hospital staff and the bristling of his mothers ribs beneath his cheek disturbed him.

"Madam ..." a nurse began, exasperated in the extreme.

"No," his mother said, folding Bugsy deeper into her and looking long in the paltry light upon his petite fine-fingered hands closed on her own, so exactly like her own.

"Madam, you haven't slept."

"No."

"For your child."

"My child is dying." She betrayed nothing them. Her voice was steady. Her breath passing over Bugsy's ear and cheek was full of something nourishing to him as barley and honey.

This dance was an encore. She did not struggle now when they shot her - she did not, at least, show her teeth and kick and roar, but she did articulate to the intern handling the needle in her look that she should with levity end his life if that would help anything whatsoever, if it would add one instant to her child's time on earth, and she passed quietly into unwilling sleep beneath Bugsy's small heavy skull.

Bugsy loved his mother. She was his lantern. He wanted to give her himself for just a little more ... just a little while longer.

She was carried with a little perfunctory care from his bouquet-colorful little room and he was rearranged, hushed, touched, and he tolerated all this though he stared with not a little disdain - he had no choice.

He believed he had dreamed of his special friend, who certainly remained in his ancestral home, wondering hurt and helpless where he had gone. He dreamed his mother and sisters returned without him and his special friend did not understand where he had gone.

Scyfie could not cry. Would it understand what happened to him? Would it wait for him? Would it wait until the day it died?

The moon shone out of the mists and lit the needle in the thin milky inside of his arm a startling silver. Bugsy thought he was like the moon - cold, pale, inert, quiet, and alone encapsulate.

He wanted dearly not be alone.

* * *

no more breathing time

an ambulance sped

it sped round every corner

coiling out his name


	3. an ambulance sped

It was not so difficult to escape - not so difficult as he had expected, that is, but excruciatingly difficult all the same. Every step was an effort of a hundred years.

He wore the threadbare boy's sweatshirt brought for his mother, long discarded beside the chair where she stood sentinel over his suffering. It dropped past his buttock, reduced to something narrow and sallow like the parts of a very old man, and past the purpled pulpy marks in the dimple of little arm from which he plucked the evil needle. It probably permitted his passage out of the sleeping hospital. It smelled wonderfully of his mother.

His throat and mouth and ears he swathed in one of his sister's voluminous filmy garments, like a scarf. His own little discolored boots, thankfully, he had worn into the room that day aeons ago. He discovered them crumpled together beneath the cot. They were very warm.

He felt only a little sorrow at leaving the toys and treats which had been plastered over the smell of decay in his little white room, but he left them all.

He rode the elevator, leaning hard on the buttons which lit like a Christmas tree and squinting in the ugly chemical light. He tottered quite close to the hand of a beautifully dressed gentleman and hence slipped out of the lobby.

The night was far colder than he remembered ever knowing - the ground harder, the very air inhospitable to what slips of irresolute white skin was naked to it - but the black of the sky nearly knocked his knees out from under him, the clean white spray of the stars so unlike the false sour color inside, the mist and greenery heavenly to smell, to dwell near. Bugsy wanted to cry.

Bugsy pointed the crumpled toes of his little boots away from the beautiful bright matron on her diamond throne at the apex of the sky he identified as the north star, tucked his trembling hands discolored at the tips from the abuse of escape, looked long into the winding road away from the hospital parlor, loping over hill and the sound of the city, somewhere along which under that very moon and star were the woods and his mother's little yellow house on the hill.

It was very, very, very cold. 


	4. calling out his name

He walked in the lanes of nodding flowers, pale and frail like he with the autumn hostility, painted along the streets abandoned in the unholy hour.

He walked along the pink bricks opalescent in the prismatic starlight. He walked, stumbling a little as though drunk.

He walked through the shadows of towering apartments, under the broadcasts in the brightly lit windows of the lives of other children yet untouched by the man in the wood, the man which made him sick, children who dwelled still in the twinkling spring of their little lives.

He stood on the silver braids of the train tracks a while and remembered that when he was very little, for a time, he had wanted to become a train conductor.

He cried a little and his teardrops which escaped the draping sleeves of his mother's sweatshirt like diamonds embedded in the moon-bright steel seemed very small, stupid, meaningless.

He was very cold. He became accustomed to it by becoming numb, but he felt it in a quiet cunning pain stitched where his limbs met his torso, in the muffled atmosphere of his head, in the intense pulsing tiredness which pulled his fingers and feet earthward.

Standing in the street, he was almost asleep, suspended somewhere in the unknowable cold of his mortality, and a man came to him out of the dark.

A young man, bespectacled, unlovely and sad to see like a mistake, yet Bugsy was afraid of him.

He would of ran if that were any longer imaginable to him.

Instead he merely looked at the man, and the man touched his waifish shaking shoulders gently in both his hands, and spoke though Bugsy could understand him no better than he understood the cries of birds, and the man drew him gently over and up, and then Bugsy was held by the man, wrapped in the dark ugly uniform coat the man bore like a swaddled toddler.

"It's okay," he managed to extract out of the silken sounds the man was making to him.

Bugsy was still afraid, but he felt his fear very deep in his thoughts, like a dragon stirring in the sea.

Soon he felt not even that, not even the pain in his decaying body, only the inexorable crushing tide of sleep coming upon him and the hale and hearty hum of the strange man's heart in his breast, very warm, beautifully warm, and then he felt nothing at all.


End file.
